


kintsugi

by altoverse



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: 5.0/5.3 spoilers, Angst, Female Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Gen, Kintsugi, i have 5 billion wips and yet i wrote this in an hour, i love the entire concept of kintsugi and you should too, kind of?, many regrets to be had, no beta we die like men, soul sight, such is the way of things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-18 07:35:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28988619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altoverse/pseuds/altoverse
Summary: Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to be disguised.---(5.0/5.3 spoilers)At the end of everything, what is broken can never be repaired.Or can it?
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	kintsugi

_What is broken cannot be made whole again._

Emet-Selch had always been a staunch believer in this philosophy, even as he toiled endlessly to bring the shattered pieces of his people back together, one world at a time. 

His empires may have been engineered to crumble, the fallout triggering a flood of aether that would prompt another shard to join with its source, but he expected them to fail regardless from the very start. These _pieces_ , these faint mockeries of his friends and loved ones and fellow citizens - even if everything was handed to them on a silver platter, they would find a way to break the unbreakable and scatter his best efforts to the wind.

 _Ugly._ They were ugly, twisted mockeries of what had once been, and he would not suffer them to continue living off the stolen lives of the Ancients. 

Azem would surely hate him for what he was doing. For what he had done, he thought idly as the Crystal Tower sunk below the earth of Mor Dhona with a soul-rending rumble. He faintly felt the influx of aether from the Ninth, shattered pieces of their souls falling into the conglomerations they had become on the Source. Another shard to add to the pile. 

_Azem was a bleeding heart,_ another part of him whispered in the back of his mind. _So naive, believing she could change what was inevitable, until the day it sundered her very being._

She had hated him until the very end. 

Nothing to do but carry on, he thought with the faintest twinge of bitterness in his chest. Another empire to build, another society to topple. His work was far from done. 

Emet-Selch had met seven shards of Azem. He had watched seven shards of Azem die. 

_This one will be no different,_ he thought idly as he scrutinized the eighth, struggling to crawl to her feet even in the face of her doom. He watched her soul - fragments seemingly held together by some manner of miracle - as it splintered and cracked under the weight of five Lightwardens' worth of aether. _Pathetic._

He dispatched of her equally weak allies with the barest swipe of his hands, looming over her in his true form, ready to strike. 

And then his vision suddenly filled with blue, radiating outwards from the cracks in her soul. Something seemed to click into place as she got to her feet, axe of light raised to strike a blow to him that even he did not have the foresight to dodge - 

After what seemed like eons, the light faded, save for the remaining vestiges of the weapon that had cleaved a hole in his chest. 

Hades reached for his disdain, his anger at this half-complete mockery of his dearest friend - and found it lacking. 

Had he always hated imperfect, incomplete things this much? 

Or had it been the influence of Zodiark, working His way into the very depths of his soul and shattering anything He perceived as weakness into nothing? 

As he closed his eyes and waited for the abyss to scatter him to dust, for the Lifestream's gentle hold to bear him away, his sight fell onto the Warrior's - Azem's - soul standing bright and whole before him. The cracks that had once split her very being were not gone, but repaired with a light that shone a different shade of blue, one that somehow remained the same in its kindness and determination - 

his last thought was that he had never seen anything more beautiful.

**Author's Note:**

> come join [the bookclub](https://discord.gg/enabling-debauched-xivfic) we have an emotional support ascian who gives reluctant hugs


End file.
